Yesterday was quite a historic day- the 100th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, the first open attempt by the Nazis to take control of Germany. I'm sure most of you have heard of this event, but I think it is important to remember what it was about. From the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, here is a bit of an account:
"On November 8–9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government. This attempted coup d'état came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
They began at the Bürgerbräu Keller, a beer hall in the Bavarian city of Munich. Hitler and the Nazi Party aimed to seize control of the state government, march on Berlin, and overthrow the German federal government. They sought to establish a new government to oversee the creation of a unified Greater German Reich. In this new government, citizenship would be based on race.
The putsch failed and Bavarian authorities prosecuted nine participants, including Hitler. Despite its failure, the leaders ultimately redefined the putsch as a heroic effort to save the nation."
I hardly think I need to point out the similarities with the january 6th coup attempt, except that in 1923, Hitler was far from the head of the government. Of course, he was given the lightest possible sentence:
"Like the majority of judges during the Weimar period, (Judge) Neithardt tended, in cases of high treason, to show leniency towards right-wing defendants who claimed to have acted out of sincere, patriotic motives"
Hitler ended up spending little more than a year in prison for this act of treason, thanks to a court system packed with right wing judges. Had this not been the case, the Nazi party could have been stopped in the 1920's, and World War II, with its 50 million dead, would likely never have happened.
Well, I guess Germans could ask us to remember that they had no idea of what was to follow from their failure to rein in right wing hatred; we do not have that excuse. We all know what our country is risking by refusing to react appropriately to the abomination of Republican anti-democratic violence. And let us remember that Trump, should he come back to power, will have something that Hitler never had: 5,000 nuclear weapons to threaten the world.
This is not a paranoid delusion; it is a real possibility which millions of Americans, incited by appeals to their hatred, seem ready to countenance. Hitler included, there may never have been a greater threat to the continued existence of civilization, and yet these people toy with this danger, in order to sate their worst instincts. I am sorry, but nobody can predict how this will end.
Comments